Many thousands of dissidents, deserters, or other people were arrested, tortured or executed by various Cheka groups.

Originally, the members of the Cheka were exclusively Bolshevik ; however, in January 1918, the Left SRs also joined the organization The Left SRs were expelled or arrested later in 1918, following the attempted assassination of Lenin by an SR, Fanni Kaplan.

In addition, border security Chekas were included in the system of local Cheka bodies.

There 40 anarchists were killed by Cheka forces, and about 500 were arrested and jailed after a pitched battle took place between the two groups.

In May 1919, two Cheka agents sent to assassinate Makhno were caught and executed.

Many victims of Cheka repression were ' bourgeois hostages ' rounded up and held in readiness for summary execution in reprisal for any alleged counter-revolutionary act.

Approximately 500, 000 deserters were arrested in 1919 and close to 800, 000 in 1920, by troops of the ' Special Punitive Department ' of the Cheka, created to punish desertions.

Some believe it is possible more people were murdered by the Cheka than died in battle.

Women and children were also victims of Cheka terror.

Cheka departments were organized not only in big cities and guberniya seats, but also in each uyezd, at any front-lines and military formations.

" Nicholas Roerich and his son George were waiting in the Cheka office to see Dzerzhinsky when they heard of Dzerzhinsky's death.

In March 1919 after a failed workers revolt against Bolshevik rule thousands of people were executed by the Cheka under orders from Sergey Kirov.

When nearly half of Makhno's troops were struck by a typhus epidemic, Trotsky resumed hostilities ; the Cheka sent two agents to assassinate Makhno in 1920, but were captured and after confessing, were executed.

Among the commanders leading the Red Army in the coming offensive were Leon Trotsky, Tukhachevsky ( new commander of the Western Front ), Alexander Yegorov ( new commander of the Southwestern Front ), the future Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin, and the founder of the Cheka ( secret police ), Felix Dzerzhinsky.

With the end of the Polish-Soviet War and the defeat of General Wrangel, the RKKA could divert its regular troops into the area-in total over 100, 000 Red Army soldiers were deployed, including special Cheka detachments.

Documents relating to the rebellion were found by the local ethnographer Boris Sennikov in 1982 while he was engaged in clearing sand from the altar of the Winter Church of the Kazan monastery-during the 1920s the monastery had been requisitioned for use as the local Cheka headquarters and the church had served as the archive of the Tambov Military Commissariat.

Its privileged employees were the Cultural Revolution equivalent of Vladimir Lenin ’ s Cheka and Adolf Hitler ’ s Gestapo.

With the devastation of the economy during the Russian Civil War and the period of war communism with its policy of prodrazvyorstka ( food requisition by state ), meshochniks from countryside were seen as profiteers and persecuted by the Cheka.

Directed from Petrograd at first the commission had several regional departments ( Gubcheks ) that were officially titled Provincial Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage and were generally known as the Kiev Cheka, Kharkov Cheka, Odessa Cheka, etc.

The Cheka, employing secret agents in local socialist circles, were well informed of the conspiracy and popular dissatisfaction of the Bolshevik rule.

Cheka ( ЧК-чрезвыча ́ йная коми ́ ссия chrezvychaynaya komissiya, Extraordinary Commission, ) was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations.

On February 6, 1922, after the Ninth All-Russian Soviet Congress, the Cheka was dissolved by VTsIK, " with expressions of gratitude for heroic work.

* 1917 – Cheka, the first Soviet secret police, is founded.

Julian Semyonov was an influential spy novelist, writing in the Eastern Bloc, whose range of novels and novel series featured a White Russian spy in the USSR ; Max Otto von Stierlitz, a Soviet mole in the Nazi High Command, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka.

** In the Soviet Russia, the Cheka becomes the GPU, a section of the NKVD.

Dzerzhinsky is best known for establishing and development of the Soviet State Security forces under their original name Cheka ( 1917-26 ).

In the 1930s and 1940s, political repression was practiced by the Soviet secret police services Cheka, OGPU and NKVD.

They are syllabic abbreviations typical for the Russian language of the early Soviet era, although many Cheka and Internal Troops units such as OMSDON used a osobovo naznacheniya designation in their full names.

The title was used during the Provisional Government for regional heads of administration, but it is mostly associated with a number of Cheka and military functions in Bolshevik and Soviet government military forces during the Russian Civil War ( the White Army widely used the collective term " bolsheviks and commissars " for their opponents ) and with the later terms People's Commissar ( or narkom ) for government ministers and political commissar in the military.

First mentioned in 1606 as Rastyapino (), it has been named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Bolshevik leader who was the first head of the Soviet Cheka ( secret police ), since 1929.

Józef Unszlicht or Iosif Unshlikht (; nicknames " Jurowski ", " Leon ") ( in Mława, Płock Governorate-July 28, 1938 on a shooting range in Moscow Oblast ), a Bolshevik revolutionary activist, one of the founders of the Cheka, and Soviet government official of Polish-Jewish extraction from the Masovian region.

With the creation of the Soviet Union all the Cheka departments were consolidated into the State Political Directorate of NKVD that consisted of the respective republican ministries.

In 2002, Luzhkov proposed returning to Lubyanka Square the fifteen ton iron statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet Cheka.

After brief negotiations, Leon Trotsky ( then the Minister of War in the Soviet Government, and the leader of the Red Army ) responded by sending the army to Kronstadt, along with the Cheka.

Active Measures () were a form of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services ( Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB ) to influence the course of world events, " in addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessment of it ".

In the Soviet Union, foreign intelligence was formally formed in 1920, as a foreign department of Cheka ( Inostrannyj Otdiel — INO ).

The Soviet defeat in the Polish-Bolshevik War was the main reason for the formation of a large independent intelligence department in Cheka structures.

The first chief of the Soviet foreign intelligence service, Cheka foreign department ( Inostranny Otdel — INO ), was Yakov Davydov.

After the Russian Revolution, the club eventually found itself under the authority of the Interior Ministry and its head Felix Dzerzhinsky, chief of the Soviet Union's first secret police force, the notorious Cheka.

* Cheka, first of a succession of Soviet state security organization

Kozlovsky ) of the Cheka of the Petrograd Soviet in the winter of 1917-18.

On the night of April 11, the Cheka ( Soviet secret police ) raided a building occupied by the Moscow Federation, with the official aim of arresting and charging " robber bands " in the anarchist ranks.

Before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, McQuinn wrote and edited Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed under the pseudonym " Lev Chernyi " in honor of the Russian anarchist of that name, who was killed in 1921 by the Cheka ( the Bolshevik secret police ).